..and while being held back in Frankfurt's airport I had some time to kill thinking about it.

What would you think are normal security equipment, personnel and procedures in an average sixth world sprawl? I'd think maybe some kind of assensing should be done, as a mage is too dangerous to let in without the staff knowing about him, and you can't take the off chance that someone uses a fake SIN without an awakened record. MAD scanners to detect cyberware, obviously, and probably a demand to empty cyberclips and deactivate implanted hand to hand weapons.

While I would imagine spellcasting is strictly prohibited aboard a plane, and penalties for it so draconian few upstanding citizens break it, but how to protect aircraft from outside magic threats? Of course the magical talent to find a plane and summon something big and bad enough to tear it out of the sky is just about so rare, but it only takes one elder shaman pissed that SAS built a plane plant on top of his ancestral lands to ruin your day.

Is it possible to ward a plane, or must wards be stationary at all times? Maybe a mage could travel with planes (going at the speed of thought in the astral, this is not an unreasonable demand of high-priority flight security mages.

..or are you just hosed if you can't afford a suborbital to fly over most atmospheric threats?

(I seem to recall some sourcebook having material on checkpoint security, but for the life of me I can't remember which one. Any of you know?)

Biometric ID matching to central databases. Use powerful long-term bound spirits inside a ward that the passengers need to walk through (which takes out active spells...) to assense people. People magically active or with cyber who are not registered as such might have issues, though lots of people, few spirits isn't 100%. Aircraft can be warded.

For weapons, the microwave scanners used today are actually pretty effective in finding concealed weapons.

Check out:

DotA: Darkest Hour page 10
Runners Companion Pages 29-35

That's it! Thanks a lot

What they don't talk about is the impossibility of protecting air travel in the awakened world. Your average shadowrunner conjurer can decimate planes at will with spirits. There are simply not enough magical resources to protect planes. There are 87,000 flights a day (that's a rough number I got from the interwebs). They don't have the magical man power or the ability or money (that they would choose to spend) to summon enough spirits or to produce enough wards to protect anything but the terminal. As to your magical passengers I'm sure they screen awakened persons via an astral TSA agent but I doubt that either corps or the government has the magical man power to assign a guy that could even break masking. I mean seriously would you spend your initiated mages at the airport doing security? And not just one but dozens per airport.

I am sure they have you pass a ward and ask you not to reactivate your foci, like turning off your electronics on the plane. But no real mechanism to actually stop you. Probably with the same frequency as a air marshal they have a watcher, spirit or projector on the plane that tattles on you. Obviously a magically active suicide bomber is pretty much unstoppable once he is on the plane in the air.

Yeah, but i think that planes are awfully hard to spot astrally while on flight, isn't it? A shadow in the astral (as no passengers will ever be visible) flying at hundreds of miles per hour would be a tough cookie to detect... Sure, if you are on a fighter following one, that's another story, but i don't think you keep you 'relative' velocity when you project. Even if you can move at breakneck speeds on the astral, you still have to see where the plane has gone to.

Major airports are one of the places almost guaranteed to have heavy duty magical security on site.

A runner trying to attack flights might get some serious damage in, but will quickly be facing off against a small army of opposing spirits, and before long their heavy duty backup.

Also remember that many flights in the 2070s are suborbital. So they'd really only be vulnerable on takeoff and landing.



-k

Good old Harlequin has some info on cyberware aboard planes that is still applicable in 2070: Cyberware users have to register their stuff and then get a taser bracelet (explosive also variant available) that is individually programmed to detect any activation of the wearer's cyber. And due to the individual programming, the bracelets are damn likely to detect any activation.

As for casting spells at a plane, the OR of a highly processed object the size of a passenger aircraft should be pretty spectacular...

Even at the heights planes are flown today, there's also bound to be a fairly significant background count.

Why?

He probably means a Mana Ebb

Possibly...

Mana Ebbs are a subset of background counts. But yes, that is what I meant.

The other risk for planes in the 6th world is that some mage with a grudge, a telescope and a barrier spell is going to take you out of the sky from his balcony. Forget rating planes for bird strike, you have to have them reinforced for mage strike!

It's also worth pointing out that your best defense against a magical attack on an airplane is actually to have magically-active passengers.

When Sirrug destroyed that plane in retaliation for whatever got his panties in a twist, some mage who was onboard went active and actually held him off for a few minutes. That's pretty goddamn impressive, mortal metahuman magician against Great Dragon. I'm guessing that he was overcasting everything he had, and there was probably an incredible medic aboard the plane taking constant actions to heal him of the drain he sustained.

You know, I love the SR setting with all my life, but with all the crazy shit they have thought up, there's bound to be some inconsistencies.. I like the idea of airports being mana ebbs, and I imagine that it would not be controversial to ask mages to transport their foci locked into the cargo, much like you have to many places if you transport a weapon.

The airports aren't manaebbs, flying 10km (more if suborbital) above the ground is... From what I gathered here.

Sirrug attacked the plane to kill this very person, because he was active in the hunt for dragons during the 5th World. That means he was certainly not just "some mage", and possibly not even mortal

Yes, but only if they know when and where the plane will be. Probably more likely if they don't care which plane they hit and live near an airport, though.

Reopening this for a while.. I need to find the security for the Butmir airport in Sarajevo, going from the info in Runner Havens. If the corps have a lot invested in protecting the area as a transport hub, what could one reasonable expect?

I'm thinking wards, declaration of foci and the aforementioned knockout bracelets for cyber-activation, as well as pan-corp sec-groups with heavy-duty mojo and tranq systems.

Realistically, security will probably be just like today: some basic methods to avoid the most simple schemes like bringing a bomb, a cyberweapon or a spirit in the plane, a lot of useless and cumbersome security theater to make people feel safe and some half-assed methods to prevent the cause of the two last airplane hijacks.

If really trying to secure the airport, you should add nanite detectors (and destructors) in the plane and chem sniffers. But even then, you'd miss many weapons someone could get on board of the plane.

Thanks! It's just my impression that things are really ramped up for Butmir, because it's the only way in and out of the greater area, left.

I'm thinking that the airport may be "divided" - as in, there's an 'economy airport' for non-essential corporate citizens, private citizens and SINless with forged rides, where the security is mostly for show and aimed at catching wanted passengers rather than keeping the masses safe, and small extraterritorial terminals where corp personnel and well-connected runners can enter and leave without being hassled, and in relative safety.

Important people fly in private jets. They don't go through the checkpoints.

I recently did a run to the Arabian Caliphate. The GM mentioned the option of flying in a cargo crate or submit to a "mage collar" on commercial flights.

As I only have SR4A right now, I have no real frame of reference about this little gadget... But it certainly sounds expensive to mass produce.


TANGENT: Can someone catch me up as to why any mage would do a orbital/sub-orbital flight? Last time it was mentioned to me, was in 2/3e, and there were altitude rules for mages, because those who went up... never came down right. If at all. Is that just an astral projection thing?

Arsenal page 67, magecuffs are availability 5 and cost 1000 nuyen. I won't go into details on how they work, but they're pretty effective against mages who don't want some fairly serious hurt

As long as a mage doesn't try to interact with the astral (namely, trying to percieve, project or cast a spell) he's just fine in a suborbital. The veil between the astral (whatever of it you can get up there) is enough to shield him from any nasty effects - thought might still be uncomfortable. But spirits, dual-natured critters and the like who can't stay on the safe side of the fence are likely to find it a one-way trip.